Daughters Of Eden: The Eden Series Book 1

by Bingham, Charlotte

  ‘I know, son,’ the first one replied. ‘But we’re doing our job, see? We’re sentries.’

  ‘There weren’t no sentries at the gate.’

  ‘That’s right, son, there weren’t no sentries at the gate. That’s ’cos they don’t want no sentries seen at the gate, see? It would give the game away, wouldn’t it? If folk walk past and see sentries at the gate they’re going to get clued up, see?’

  ‘No I don’t,’ Billy said stubbornly, while surreptitiously examining the rifle of his questioner. He was allowed to go no further by Marjorie, who finally took over.

  ‘It’s all right, Billy,’ she said. ‘They are only doing their duty. They have a perfect right to know what we’re doing here.’ She handed them the official letter of introduction, which Jack Ward had given her.

  ‘Thank you, miss,’ the second sentry said, consulting his list. ‘That’s right – you’re expected, miss. You too, son.’ He smiled at Billy and ruffled his already tousled head. ‘You want to see my rifle?’

  ‘Yes please!’

  Billy went silent, pale with excitement, as the soldier showed him the workings of his rifle.

  ‘Is it loaded?’ he finally asked.

  ‘Course it’s loaded. We’re on sentry duty.’

  ‘Blimey,’ said Billy. ‘Stripe me.’

  He sighed with huge contentment, before following Marjorie down to the lower ground floor of the great house.

  Mrs Alderman was seated at the kitchen table when Marjorie and Billy were shown in by their escorts, a small, round-figured woman with a fuzz of grey hair and wearing a long old-fashioned dress. She was holding a handkerchief to her forehead as she tried to make sense of the billeting plan she had laid out in front of her on the table.

  ‘You’re very welcome, Miss Hendry, I’m sure,’ she said in her soft country burr. ‘You too, young man. And I’m sure you’ll both be starving and hungry after your long journey.’

  The new arrivals were a pleasant distraction for Mrs Alderman, who was fast becoming bewildered by trying to find enough rooms let alone beds for the number of people she had been told were arriving within the week. Putting the kettle on the hob, she made them a plate of juicy tomato sandwiches and polished up a couple of old-fashioned green and red apples.

  ‘You’ve fallen on your feet coming here.’ She gave a smile of some satisfaction. ‘We grows so much of our produce, as well as having a large flock of sheep and a herd of good cattle. You shouldn’t go short, my dears – always provided this blessed war don’t go on too long, which we’re all hoping, aren’t we? Although if the government’s got anything to do with it, Lord alone knows what will happen to us.’

  Marjorie and Billy ate the sandwiches too quickly for really good manners, but Mrs Alderman didn’t seem to mind, only watching them approvingly, until, much refreshed by their tea, she showed them across the stable yard to the particular cottage which had been made ready for their arrival.

  ‘Told you it was nice, didn’t I?’ Marjorie nudged Billy, who had once more fallen into a stupefied silence as he stood staring around at the comfortably furnished cottage, where a small log fire had even been lit in the fireplace in readiness for their arrival.

  ‘Nice?’ Billy said, bouncing on the bed he had already decided was to be his. ‘This place is bloomin’ heaven, Marge. Blimey.’

  ‘I do wish you’d stop saying that, Billy,’ Marjorie said, wandering off to the room that was to be hers, with Billy traipsing behind her. ‘You know what it means, and I’m sure it’s the last thing you want. To go blind.’

  ‘To go blind? I should think not!’ Billy said happily, before taking in the cosy pretty bedroom where Marjorie was to sleep. ‘Cor. Look at this then,’ he whispered. ‘Blimey.’

  Jack Ward had driven Poppy to a safe house somewhere in Victoria. Once again they were greeted without any undue surprise, this time by a pleasantly mannered, soberly dressed woman in her early thirties who disappeared to make her visitors some refreshments while Jack briefed Poppy in the privacy of the small, sparsely furnished living room.

  ‘You still have the chance to back out, Lady Tetherington,’ he began. ‘I assure you there will be no problem, if you decide what you hear is not for you.’

  ‘I think we both know the answer to that, Mr Ward,’ Poppy replied. ‘And I think it might be easier – as well as necessary, wouldn’t you say – if you were to drop the Lady Tetherington thing. And call me Poppy.’

  ‘I was going to mention that as it happens. You’ll certainly need a new name, which is something we shall work on. In the meantime perhaps it would be better, under the circumstances, if I simply called you Miss Smith. I don’t think we should become any more informal than that. And by the way, most of my people, if they call me anything, call me Colonel. It’s not my rank, just a nickname, really. All started a long time ago, long, long ago, with someone I knew rather well, a sort of joke really.’

  His voice tailed off, but despite the light-hearted words his tone was careful, as if he was recounting an historical fact rather than a sentimental anecdote.

  Poppy tried to read the look in his bespectacled eyes, but, failing, thought she had picked up something in his tone that he could not voice, but at which he was nevertheless hinting – ever present danger. All of a sudden she saw the sense of his attitude. Under the circumstances. It would be the very opposite of sensible for them to establish any sort of intimacy such as using their first names – under the circumstances.

  Under the circumstances she had already been shot at, and she imagined that given the task that Jack Ward might have in mind for her there would be many other occasions when Poppy might find herself in similarly dangerous circumstances.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she replied politely. ‘I quite understand, under the circumstances.’

  First Jack Ward outlined what her main objective would be, then how she would be prepared for it. This involved considerable and painstaking preparation which would bring about a complete change, not just of appearance, but of personality.

  When Poppy expressed some reserve, the Colonel, as she now began to think of him, explained that given her experience of Society she would be ideal, particularly after she had undergone a complete change.

  ‘Can someone change completely, enough to deceive, do you think?’

  ‘We are becoming very skilled at this sort of thing,’ Jack assured her. ‘I shall put you in the charge of one of our best people who will turn you into somebody even you yourself would not recognise.’

  ‘I think it sounds rather fun,’ Poppy replied, while actually feeling the very opposite. ‘I have often become altogether fed up being me. In fact, if you really want to know, Colonel, I have become very, very fed up with being me. Not a very successful person, as you may well imagine, already a widow at eighteen, already on the run, it’s not the best kind of record, is it?’

  Poppy laughed, and although Jack Ward did smile, he also looked momentarily wrong-footed by her candour.

  The plan was for her to be handed over first to one of Jack’s contacts in London who would work on Poppy’s character transformation, then to the woman who, as Jack had just assured Poppy, could be guaranteed to turn dross into gold.

  ‘Not that that’s the case in this instance,’ Jack added quickly. ‘In this case she will have the perfect raw material to work from.’

  ‘I wonder why you say that,’ Poppy joked, pushing her spectacles back up her nose. ‘I really do.’

  ‘I think possibly because I have seen things in you that others have not,’ Jack replied carefully. ‘Things I’m sure that you most certainly have not seen in yourself, until now.’

  Poppy said nothing, intrigued by the compliment, but refusing to demur since it had been unsolicited.

  ‘Now I have to ask you something,’ he said, taking off his heavy spectacles. ‘It’s important, as it happens.’

  ‘I have the feeling that everything you ask is important, and that if not you won’t be bothered.’r />
  Jack nodded, cleaning the thick lenses of his spectacles carefully on the immaculate white handkerchief he always carried in his top pocket.

  ‘What exactly is wrong with your eyes?’ he asked.

  ‘Astigmatism,’ Poppy replied. ‘At least I think that’s what they call it. My old nanny said if I didn’t wear glasses my eye would finally end up looking at my nose. This eye.’

  Poppy tapped the relevant lens of her own spectacles.

  ‘Might I see your glasses?’

  Jack put a hand out politely. Polly shrugged slightly, carefully removed her spectacles and handed them over.

  Jack cleaned them again on his handkerchief and put them to his own eyes.

  ‘Don’t make a lot of difference to me,’ he said. ‘But then I’m a bat.’

  Now he looked at her. Without his own spectacles on, for the first time Poppy was aware of the true set of his face and found herself disconcerted. Most people who wear glasses look oddly vulnerable once they are removed. But Jack Ward, without his glasses, looked quite the opposite. He looked determined and strong and – Poppy found herself admitting – more than a little frightening.

  As he stared at her she realised that he was not making any attempt to menace her. He was simply looking at her, and from what she had gathered from sight of his own glasses, she would look nothing more than a blur to him. But the look wasn’t to distinguish her; it was to determine something about her, and Poppy soon guessed what it might be.

  ‘I can see all right,’ she admitted. ‘Whatever is wrong with my eyes doesn’t – you know, doesn’t affect my actual vision. It’s a condition. Astigmatism – if that’s what it’s called. A slight squint in other words. A slight squint that could turn into a proper one if it doesn’t stay corrected. So I’m told. And as my old Irish nanny said, men just aren’t interested in boss-eyed girls. “You’ll never get a man now with your stigmata, Miss Poppy,” she used to say.’

  They both laughed.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Jack replied. ‘Stuff and nonsense. Firstly men find a slight squint most attractive – and that’s all you have, I’d say. Judging from the weakness of your lenses.’ He put his own glasses back on to study her now without hers. ‘A very slight squint in fact,’ he pronounced. ‘So slight that it is barely visible.’

  He folded the sides of her glasses up carefully and consigned them to one of his inside pockets.

  ‘Sorry?’ Poppy said with a frown. ‘Are you confiscating my spectacles?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jack replied. ‘You don’t need them, Miss Smith. At a guess I’d say you never have.’

  Poppy frowned, and then smiled at the once more serious-faced middle-aged man in whose hands she was now placing her life. It was not a polite smile but one of sudden and infinite gratitude.

  By now they were arriving thick and fast at Eden Park. Marjorie and Billy watched in fascination as the constant stream of cars and on a couple of occasions small single-decker buses delivered more and more people either at the gates of the park or at the house itself. Most of them seemed to be women, all apparently young, the oldest no more than in their middle twenties. They appeared to be arriving in all shapes and sizes, yet they all shared one thing in common – a look of unconcealed bewilderment as they found themselves unshipped in a place of such splendour.

  At the same time as the influx of new arrivals, more staff appeared as if from nowhere, most of them already resident on some part of the estate, as Marjorie and Billy later discovered, having been press-ganged into service by the undoubtedly persuasive powers of Major Folkestone, to whom it was fast becoming obvious no one could, or indeed wanted to, say no. They were put to work organising the interior of the house for the work that was to take place there, removing all the most valuable items of furniture and the more portable works of art, storing them away in the dry cellars that ran in catacombs under the great house. The most valuable, and in some cases priceless, paintings, were removed from their frames, rolled up, and transported to a secret place somewhere in the grounds, perhaps the family mausoleum, as Mrs Alderman once hinted to Billy.

  After which, under cover of night, with all the secrecy that normally would be afforded to the movement of troops, large lorries rolled slowly up the long drive, loaded to the brim with ministry files, office equipment, extra beds, and utility furniture, enough to seat, sleep and occupy the houseful of immigrant workers who were still arriving, in larger or smaller groups, daily.

  Daytime was spent setting all the new equipment out under the command of Major Folkestone and a Miss Browne, who had arrived shortly after Marjorie and Billy to take up her post as supervisor. She was a short woman dressed in tweeds and with her bright ginger hair worn in a Windsor bob. When he first caught sight of her, Billy thought she was a man, and still remained somewhat uncertain even after he had been introduced to her. He sympathised with Marjorie at the prospect of working for such an extraordinary creature, but Marjorie shrugged her shoulders philosophically. There were bound to be some prices to pay in order to earn the right to live in a place such as Eden Park.

  Finally, when all the new beds had been put in place in the rooms on the third floor, places Marjorie told Billy that in former days would have been occupied by the servants, Mrs Alderman pinned up a list of the updated sleeping arrangements on a large green-baize-covered board that had been placed on an easel in the main hall so that it could be seen by all who came and went in such swift succession that not even the amazing Major Folkestone could have said exactly who they were.

  Thanks to Jack Ward the list did not affect Marjorie and Billy. Major Folkestone himself told them they were to stay in their cottage for the duration.

  ‘Mr Ward insisted young Billy here must remain with you.’

  The Hendrys watched as a crowd of young women gathered to read where they were to be sleeping, and furthermore to which section they were to be attached for their forthcoming work.

  ‘Blimey,’ Billy said, putting his hands to his ears. ‘What a lot of squawking.’

  ‘Do stop saying blimey, Billy!’

  ‘Why they all screeching like that, Marge? Sound like a lot of ’ens.’

  ‘This place echoes, Billy. Bound to. Look at the size of it. It isn’t their fault.’

  ‘Never ’eard such a din. Never. I ‘aven’t.’

  Billy kept his hands to his ears as he regarded with some trepidation the girls who were still trying to find their names on the lists pinned to the board, laughing and calling to each other as they did so.

  ‘I think this is a case for the sentries,’ Billy announced seriously. ‘Maybe they could fire a couple of warning shots over their ’eads.’

  Marjorie laughed and wandered over towards the back of the pack more out of curiosity than anything. So far, due to the young Hendrys’ singular lodging arrangements, she hadn’t come into much contact with any of the new arrivals, although she imagined that was all going to change once the work started in earnest.

  The crowd was dispersing now, with everyone either committing their room and section number to memory or writing them down in notebooks or on scraps of paper. Finally the only person left in front of the notice board was a tall blonde girl, tapping her leg idly with the tennis racket she was carrying as she searched the lists for her name.

  ‘Need a hand?’ Marjorie wondered. ‘There are rather a lot of names.’

  ‘And I can’t see mine anywhere,’ the girl replied. ‘Thanks. The name is Maddox. With an x. Kate Maddox.’

  ‘I’m Marjorie. And this is Billy. My – well. He’s my sort of stepbrother really.’

  Marjorie smiled at Billy who pulled a face back at her, doing his best to hide his blushes now he was confronted with what he immediately decided was possibly the most beautiful girl he had ever seen in his whole life.

  ‘Hello, Billy,’ Kate said, putting out a hand to be shaken. ‘Aren’t you the lucky one? All these girls, and besides Major Folkestone and a couple of soldiers, you’re the only boy here so far. I sa
y, from your point of view it should be renamed Paradise Park!’

  Billy blushed even more, frowning furiously and staring at the floor in despair.

  ‘Come on, Billy,’ Marjorie encouraged him. ‘Help us find Kate’s name.’

  ‘It’s not there,’ Billy said, after a moment.

  ‘Of course it is,’ Marjorie scolded. ‘It has to be. You haven’t looked.’

  ‘All right,’ Billy shrugged. ‘Don’t believe me.’

  The girls looked first at each other, then back at the lists, this time even more closely.

  ‘He’s right,’ Kate said. ‘They seem to have left me out.’

  ‘Told you,’ Billy said. ‘Told you.’

  ‘You can’t possibly have seen, Billy,’ Marjorie said in exasperation. ‘You didn’t even look. You didn’t have time.’

  ‘I told you,’ Billy said, squaring up to Marjorie’s irritation. ‘I did look.’

  He walked off, leaving Marjorie staring after him with a puzzled frown.

  ‘What seems to be the trouble?’ Mrs Alderman wondered, as she came to pin a new list to the board, one announcing the various times for the daily meals. ‘You two look a bit lost. Oh, it’s you, Marjorie, dear,’ she said, recognising her young friend. ‘What are you bothering with the billet lists for? You got your own little place, dear.’

  ‘It’s Miss Maddox here, Mrs Alderman. She doesn’t seem to have been allocated a bed.’

  ‘I’ve got my section all right,’ Kate added. ‘But nowhere to sleep.’

  Mrs Alderman consulted both the board and the list of names in the large ledger she was carrying under her arm. She scratched her head then shook it.

  ‘Strange,’ she sighed. ‘I thought I’d done everyone. What I have done is fill all available beds—’

  ‘Oh dear, so I haven’t anywhere to sleep?’ Kate interrupted.

  ‘There’s a spare bed in the cottage, Mrs Alderman,’ Marjorie said. ‘There are two beds in my room so Miss Maddox could easily sleep there. If that’s all right.’

  ‘That’s the answer then,’ Mrs Alderman agreed, closing her ledger. ‘Long as it’s all right with you two?’